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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is an old, yet still supported branch of the award winning and highly acclaimed RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) operating system, a distribution of Linux developed and published by the powerful Red Hat company.

The distribution formerly known as Red Hat Linux

While being distributed for free, under the name of Red Hat Linux, the project is now a commercial Linux distribution sold by subscription. The development of Red Hat Linux stopped at version 9 in the year 2003, when the Fedora project was born, along with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Supports a wide range of computer platforms

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is available for purchase as both desktop and server editions, an OpenStack platform, as well as flavors for the IBM POWER and IBM System z platforms. The mainstream 32-bit (i386) and 64-bit (x86_64) hardware platforms are supported by default.

Traditional, productive and easy to use desktop environment

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 OS is built around the GNOME Classic graphical desktop environment, which uses an old-school two-panel layout, providing users with a traditional, productive and easy to use desktop session.

On the other hand, the server edition comes with powerful open source software projects, such as MariaDB, PostgreSQL, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, OpenJDK, Samba, Postfix, Perl, Python, PHP, Qt and systemd

Bottom line

Overall, RHEL is a pioneer distribution of Linux, it uses the RPM Package Manager solution for installing, updating and removing packages from the system. Unfortunately, no live version is available for purchase, which means that the user must install it on a local drive in order to use it, using the easy-to-use Anaconda graphical installer.